Materials

The Mothbox uses a Raspberry Pi 5 (or Pi4 and Pijuice), a Talentcell Battery, and a 3 channel relay as its core. The entire materials cost is about $375 per mothbox. (Depends on your options you go with and prices you get where you live). Note that many other similar tools for insect monitoring can cost between $7-$15K!

Below we try to include an up to date list for building N-copies of a Mothbox.

Here’s a link to a list of most of the parts collected for you.

Electronics

Core Electronics ($233)

Raspberry Pi and Scheduling

OR

Camera

Power

  • Battery : Talentcell 12V Lithium ion Battery PB120B1 ($90)

  • OR Talentcell PB240b1 The PB120B1 started going out of stock sometimes, but this updated model should do fine (and has more battery capacity!)

  • Relay Expansion Pi Hat (Waveshare 3x relay) ($18)
    • Buy
    • Info
    • Remember you can also wire individual relays, but not solid state relays (they can’t switch low dc voltage)
  • 12V regulator / Step-Up Voltage Booster
    • Buy
    • This extends your battery life by keeping power to the 12V lights even if your battery voltage starts dipping low.
  • (Optional) Power sensor for monitoring battery levels *Buy

    Lighting ($60)

  • Photography Lights (2x)
    • 2x 12V 144 LED ringlight ($23)
    • The 144 LED ringlights seem to be about the brightest, diffuse 12V LEDs you can find for the price. They are also quite ubiquitous and a standard(ish) form factor
    • Purchase 2 of them
    • 2.55” (65mm) inside and 3.75” (95mm) overall outside diameters
  • UV lights
    • 12V
      • Any UV light that accepts a 12V input will work easily * Cheap 12V Waterproof UV flood ($13)
      • We are also using out custom “Mothbeams” which are like powerful, open source, bespoke, low cost- lepileds. They currently cost about $80 to order them from Moritz at LabLab in Berlin [moritz at lablab.eu] * Or you can order them from Circuithub but there they cost about $200-$400
    • 5V (Not Officially Integrated)

The Box ($25)

  • Plano 1460-00 ($25)
    • To be as compact as possible, we designed around the Plano 1460-00 case. It’s cheap, waterproof, CLEAR, quite available internationally, and as compact as possible
    • (sometimes called plano 3600) 11”L x 7”W x 4”H </span>

Camera Lens Gear ($20)

We are turning the box into a kind of 55mm lens camera so accessories that work for a 55mm lens should work

Additional Parts

Tools for Construction

1x the following: Here’s a list of the tools you need to actually create a Mothbox. If you are building multiple mothboxes, you only need one of these tools no matter how many you make.